TEARS OF GUILE

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 47, 20 November 1918, Page 4

TEARS OF GUILE

Having accepted the terms dictated by the Allies for the armistice, the Germans arc now making tearful supplications to America for sympathetic intervention in the direction of securing some modification of the conditions. It is to be feared that their tears arc the tears of guile. It has been prophesied by those who .know the Teuton temperament that when the' German was beaten he would squeal, but that his lamentations wo.uld not be the cries of one in pain, llather would they be an appeal to the soft-hearted for influential action. After more than four years of experience of German deceit, cowardice, braggadocio, bluster, and treachery, it is not likely that the Allies or America will be deceived by Di;. Sof.f's propaganda of woe. An English contemporary gives some instances of what be calls the Hun's remarkable capacity for shedding ready, tears at the psychological moment. The writer, who had had something to do with

official investigations of the subtle German in England, says:

There was the rich German wliom I visited at his luxurious house in the south of London to ask how. he came to get petrol every month for his motor-car nt a time of acute shortage. When lie was pressed for an answer great tears of extraordinary size and number—like great raindrops—coursed down his cheeks. Somehow tliey created the impression that lio could produce them to order. When ho could cry no more he said that ho "only got two gallons a month to give the car a run and keep it in order." With a sob lie added the justification: "It's a very beautiful car." There was the Hun manufacturer who had contracts with the War Office early in the war, and who, when I asked him a few points about his business, wept so copiously as to suggest that he would never be able' to answer. And the German householder who, having given peremptory notice to a British family to clear out of a house, cried like a child

on being asked about it. . . . When the Huns have been conquered we shall have to be careful of their capacity to weep. They will use it for all they are worth to excite sympathy.

It follows, of course, after such a devastating war of attrition, backed by victorious campaigns, as has been waged by the navies and armies of the Allies that the enemy's countries must be in parlous straits. But those conditions apply with even stronger force to the small and stricken nations who have with simple valour defied the Prussian sword and ranged themselves on the side of the Allies, with the result that their territories have been invaded, overrun, and devastated, their populations outraged, starved, and maltreated, and their spirit well-nigh broken. To these the Allies must render their .earliest relief. It, is not the mood of the Allies to trample vcngefully upon thev beaten foes or stand aloof in callous contemplation of their late enemies undergoing tortures of misery and want. But let no false sentiment or misplaced sympathy detract one fraction _ from the sentence which justice, in the name of freedom, of outraged humanity, -has decreed for those who have sought to destroy the whole fabric of Christian civilisation in their .mac! lust for world power..